Broadband

Larry on my IT team was nice enough to scout around Norwalk, CT looking for an iPad 2 for me and this is the photo he sent back from Best Buy. Larry says at least 60-80 people were in it. The going rate to cut the line is $500 BTW. The AT&T store across the street from TMC HQ had four units and they sold out quickly. And forget about getting many retailers carrying iPads to even think about answering phones today.

It is obvious that Apple has built tremendous consumer trust and if a tablet manufacturer even dreams of penetrating Apple's massive market share they need to way over deliver.

Comcast has just introduced 100 Mbps voice and scalable voice service in in California and the bundle shows the cable provider is very serious about becoming a major player in the fixed-line voice and data business. Combining Sharepoint, Exchange Server and antivirus software, Comcast Business Class Internet is a viable solution for companies who want to outsource much of their information technology needs to their carrier.

For more, I reached out to VoIP blogger and tech enthusiast Andy Abramson for his thoughts:

"This new effort combines the Docsis 3.0 cable modem standard with the acquisition of NGT by Comcast.

If your cloud services relay on a data center which is in an area affected by a natural disaster and your users or home office is not, you probably look at the recent disaster in Japan as a negative for cloud-based services. the reality is however that once your services are in the cloud, you will be able to more easily have access to computing resources which are geographically dispersed.

Moreover, generally speaking, a data center is more resilient to natural disasters than a typical office would be. This is the case for example with the Terremark building in Miami, FL which while located in a hurricane zone, is one of the most disaster-proof structures you will find. This is likely why the US government virtually owns an entire floor of the building and moreover why Verizon decided to buy the company as it expands its cloud strategy.

Larry Dignan has more analysis on the topic at ZDnet and its worth a read.

The iPad 2 has only been on sale for a few hours online and already shipping estimates have gone from 3-5 days to 2-3 weeks. Perhaps this isn't too surprising as analysts believe 15-20% of users of the original iPad will upgrade. This includes me by the way.

Some are calling for 600,000 iPad 2 devices to be sold this weekend in over 10,000 stores from AT&T, Verizon, Wal-Mart and many others.

Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised as we know the price of trade-ins on original iPads has been dropping since the announcement of the new device. Mashable has more on whether you should order online or in a store.

My take is if you can't wait, order one online and stand in line this weekend if you find a store with one in stock.

As Tammy Wolf reports in the TMC Newsroom, Sprint and T-Mobile may merge, allowing the weakest national wireless carriers to merge resources and become more credible against the threat from AT&T and Verizon. If there is one thing the wireless industry has learned these past years is network quality is the largest differentiator from a marketing perspective and as these wireless companies all will support LTE and most likely many of the same devices, carrier's likely can't count on an exclusive killer device as much as they did in the past.

In other words, if Verizon and AT&T had both used the exact same network technology, we may have seen Apple support both networks earlier on. Moreover, if there is a merger, all three providers will likely be about the same size in terms of customers meaning better negotiating power with device manufacturers - not to mention equipment providers.

Carl Ford, co-founder of the 4GWE conference thinks the fact that there are relatively new CEOs at Sprint, T-Mobile and Clearwire bodes well for a deal which is currently at the rumor stage. I tend to agree.

It seems to me that the need for these companies to get together is predicated on the fact that there is a perception issue in the US that Verizon has the best network and the others just aren't as good.

In the past I have discussed how TV disruption may happen more slowly than you think because of the tens of billions of dollars in affiliate fees changing hands. But this doesn't mean there aren't brilliant innovators out there using YouTube and other sites to become stars.

Consumer warning: Craziness, profanity and catchiness below

For example I was sent this Charlie Sheen Winning music video today and it is quite catchy. I found it playing "itself" in my head at lunch. Its a Songify This creation by the Gregory Brothers and a look at some of their top videos shows views in range of the many millions - about 60 million "season one" in fact.

So the challenge for TV is not only new methods of delivery but competition for the viewer's time.

It was back in 2007 when my fellow bloggers and journalists told me that Skype was a dog, had no future, couldn’t make money and wasn’t going anywhere. I begged to differ – the way I saw it the company simply didn’t execute on its potential. I quickly jotted down 11 ideas the company should pursue and in my post I even offered myself to Meg Whitman as a consultant to help implement my ideas.

Fast forward a few years and Meg is gone, and the company was sold and is now implementing the ideas – slowly but surely but many have been implanted in the last week which is why this analysis makes sense to present today.

Two years ago I warned readers that most tablets will fail and since that time we have been waiting for all the tablets to come out so we can determine who the winners and losers will be. Obviously Apple and Android-based devices look safest at this point but likewise we can feel fairly confident in products from RIM based on the company's history.

I just came across an article on TMC's InfoTech Spotlight site where Doug Mohney explains fairly convincingly why this is the case and moreover how the idea of an $800 tablet selling in massive quantities is unlikely based on simple supply and demand analysis coupled with the simple fact that people who wanted a tablet already went out and purchased an iPad.

A typical VAR is used to frequently selling large ticket items which may not all have the largest margins but in volume can throw off a good amount of cash and profit. As a result, many resellers have developed a business model with commensurate expenses and as the market shifts to cloud-based services with OPEX budgets being used instead of CAPEX, customers are reducing their immediate spend and spreading their dollars over months if not years.

And the typical VAR is not ready for the shift. This is what was discussed in a recent conversation at TMC headquarters in Norwalk, CT with George Fandos, Vice President of Global Data Center for Westcon Group.

In a conversation, I learned this $3.5B distributor has tremendous insight into how VARs need to prepare themselves for the future. Moreover, I had a chance to learn how the company has become a large distributor of Cisco products via their Comstor division and they not only distribute but use and are fans of Cisco UCS solutions as they are faster to configure and reduce the need for cabling in a data center.

The company is focusing on the flattening of the network, virtualization and cloud-based solutions.

Rich wearing the TMC hat
(No, I couldn't find any St. Bernard pics)
Apologies for not blogging in some time - I've been wearing my running TMC hat as CEO which means meetings, strategy sessions, mission statement updates, etc. TMC is growing rapidly and it is an exciting time to be in media and TMC is fortunate to have some really great customers partnered in our success and loyal readers like you. I am always amazed - when you become a blogger you have so many ideas, you can't get them all out regardless of how much time you have. I want to spend the rest of the night writing but alas, I cannot.